


Fishbowl

by MaverickWerewolf



Series: Song of the Stars Vore [1]
Category: Nova Refuge, Original Work
Genre: Gen, I'm back at my vore thing again, I'm really proud of that actually, Non-sexual vore, Soft Vore, Vore, safe vore, this one has a better explanation of John's second stomach thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28562676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaverickWerewolf/pseuds/MaverickWerewolf
Summary: When Oom - an Achmer, an aquatic species that has only gills - takes a hit and his mechsuit's water reservoir is damaged, it's up to some quick thinking and John's mutations to keep Oom alive.
Series: Song of the Stars Vore [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096031
Kudos: 15





	Fishbowl

**Author's Note:**

> I have a bunch of vore (and some mpreg) laying around that I never actually posted here. I figure I may as well post it. So here's another one.

“Shephard!”

He wheeled in an instant to see Darrow kneeling over Oom, who lay flat on his back in his mechsuit – with water leaking all over the floor.

_Crap._

“He took a hit!” Darrow blurted, pressing his hands against a hideous crack in the water tanks like he was trying to stem someone’s bleeding. “It hit his breathing tanks – I dunno how to stop it!”

“If he loses that water he’ll _drown_ ,” Walker said, panic making her voice shake.

John just stood there, staring, mind racing. There was no way to easily repair the tanks, not with what supplies they had. They were too far from anything to get Oom there safely, and there was definitely nothing in an abandoned facility to help an Achmer patch up his mechsuit.

Right now, it looked like Oom was pretty screwed. And as much as he didn’t like Oom – at all – the thought of him slowly drowning on air made John wince.

“Wait!” Rivers suddenly shouted, voice entirely too loud. “Wait, I got it! Major!” Rivers whirled to face him, wearing a grin that raised John’s hackles with worry. “You can save him!”

John’s mind hit a brick wall. “What?”

“You can save him— use your – that – the pouch thing! The stomach not-stomach thing!” He suddenly shoved his oversized canteen into John’s chest. “You drink all our water and put it in your thing, fill it up, and then put Oom in there— he’ll breathe and he’ll be fine!”

_What the living hell._

John licked his lips. “Lieutenant,” he said slowly, gently pushing away the canteen still being jabbed at him, “that is not happening.”

“What?” Rivers said, looking suddenly outraged and crestfallen all at once. “But – you could save him!”

Everyone else was silent. They stared. Darrow, Walker – even Oom. They just… stared.

John swallowed.

“That plan _sucks_ , Lieutenant,” he half hissed, half growled.

“Actually it… doesn’t,” Walker put in, slowly and hesitantly. “Wrognoth pouches are kinda _designed_ to carry living things…”

 _Why do I have one of them then?_ John shifted his weight between his feet.

“Look I don’t know what anyone is planning but he’s losing water _fast_ here, and it’s not like he can tell us what he thinks because his voice modulator is broken!” Darrow snapped, still in a panic.

“Oom,” Rivers said, turning to him, “give us one nod for yes, two for no.”

John’s eyes flicked to Oom and he stared. Oom’s shining black eyes went between the four of them before landing on Rivers again – and he nodded.

Once.

And all of John’s insides twisted into so many knots he wasn’t sure he could swallow _anything_ right now.

“Guys…” he started, a little hoarser than he’d imagined himself being, but absolutely everyone was already taking their canteens off their belts, vests, and backpacks, and putting them in a pile. Meanwhile, all the color drained from John’s face like someone pulled a drain plug. He knew because he felt it happening as a peculiar cold washed over him from head to foot, like a bucket of ice water.

He took a breath. Set his jaw, glanced at Oom, and muttered, “Alright fine, give me the damn water.”

Stomping over to Darrow who still had a canteen in his hand, John reached down and snatched it from him, unscrewing the top and starting to drink. And drink. And drink.

“Remember not to—” Darrow started, and John paused between swallows just long enough to growl and shut him up.

Yeah, he was trying not to – actually _drink_ it. Some of it went the wrong way, or the _right_ way, to his stomach instead but he was managing to focus enough to swap tracks in his throat like a freaking train and send the water into that… not-stomach instead. Wrognoth organ. Pouch. Thing.

Whatever the hell you wanted to call it.

It felt entirely too weird, collecting swallow after swallow of water into something inside him that started filling up. Retaining all of it like a reservoir. Or more like a water skin, one with way too much room for more.

So he finished off Darrow’s first canteen and handed it back to him, kneeling to scoop up a few of the others.

“If we die of dehydration, it’s on Rivers,” John said just before starting to guzzle the next container of water.

And he kept drinking – and drinking… God, how much water did they all _carry?_

“You might want to hurry up,” Darrow prompted, throwing Oom a look. The water reservoir in his suit was completely dry. Oom lay there, unreadable – and probably holding his breath, if Achmer could even do that kind of thing. His gills were shut tight, sucked hard into his sides, and he didn’t move.

“Shit,” John muttered as he started drinking the last canteen. If Oom didn’t drown first, _he_ just might from trying to drink so fast.

The pouch in his abdomen that hadn’t ever been on his mind before very much was now. It was full of water. Absolutely loaded. It sloshed loudly as John stepped toward Oom, and he tried not to wonder just how much it probably pushed his stomach out by now just from the water. His vest felt too tight already.

“Alright,” John said as he knelt beside Oom and started taking his mechsuit off, with Darrow darting over to help. “If this works, Oom, you are _really_ gonna owe me for this.”

Oom just nodded again, a single nod. John’s insides twisted and squirmed. Something in his guts kind of tickled funny and he wished it’d stop. He also wished everyone would stop _staring_.

This was such a bad idea.

But they got Oom out of the suit – and only then did John realize just how… relatively small Oom was. The biggest thing on him was the head plate. Otherwise he was mostly just a kind of narrow, slender body with lots of fins and – tentacles.

John shuddered.

“You need to do this _now_ ,” Darrow said, staring John in the face while he sat there locked in some kind of self-conscious mostly disgusted torture.

“Yeah— yeah,” John blurted. “I – I know.”

Oom moved. He squirmed, leaned his head back and flattened his head plate right against his spine. It made him surprisingly aerodynamic. And surprisingly like some kind of big, finned, tentacled, fishy pill. _A hard pill to swallow,_ John thought, then wanted to kick himself for doing it.

So, with both hands, he took Oom around the shoulders and hoisted him up – bodily – to point Oom’s face right at his. Then he closed his eyes, because he really didn’t want to see Oom staring at him the entire time, and opened his mouth wide.

 _“Your jaws mutated,”_ he remembered Darrow saying, playing his voice over in his head as he pushed Oom toward his open maw. _“Your skull, it has – it has_ articulation _now, like a_ _… a… a_ snake _or something, or I should say like a Wrognoth – like you_ _’re_ built _for doing this, you_ _’re built for swallowing things. Live things. Whole things.”_

 _“Oh come on, Henry,”_ John had said at the time, because it’d sounded so stupid.

Yeah, it still sounded stupid. Even as he felt Oom’s face start sliding between his teeth – and he felt Oom’s mouth tentacles start tickling the back of his throat.

Miraculously, he didn’t gag. And miraculously, something in him told him to swallow, so he did. He swallowed just once as hard as he could, and he felt Oom’s entire body slide right past his hands still holding Oom up. His throat pulled so hard it dragged Oom inside past his shoulders, his entire head stuck in John’s throat – somewhere in his chest. His chest felt like it wanted to explode, his organs felt _out of place_ —

 _Pouch, not stomach. Pouch, not stomach. Second stomach, not the first one_. He didn’t want to _eat_ him. Not in _that_ sense, anyway, since if you asked him this was still _eating._ Just not – digesting.

So he swallowed again. Another hard gulp and Oom’s slippery weight slid down so easily it made his heart race with strange, sudden terror at how easy this was, how _natural_ it felt. He opened his eyes and saw a long Achmer tail dangling from his own mouth and squirming this way and that, and something in him wanted to fall back onto his ass and panic – but he didn’t.

Instead, he fought to stay calm and swallowed again. Just one more time and Oom’s tail disappeared entirely, the finned tip of it tickling its way down his throat and making him shudder violently – while all the rest of Oom pushed into that second stomach.

It made room for him. Expanded outward, supportingly, like a hammock filled with weight – and his vest creaked from strain while he grunted at the discomfort.

Darrow, Walker, _and_ Rivers were all over him inside of a second, but Walker got there first. Kneeling right in front of him, she quickly undid the latches on his vest and let it open – so his stomach, but not his stomach, his stomach _area_ could grow exponentially as Oom squeezed down into the pouch, stretching his shirt until it bunched up at the top of his now very bulging belly.

Finally, John pulled in a deep breath, wheezed, and tried to focus on breathing. Everything felt weird. _He_ felt weird. And _heavy_ , that was one word for it. A weird, somehow satisfying kind of weight.

Except when he dared to glance down at himself and see the stomach he sported now, he set his jaw and felt a hot blush creeping up his neck. Which only got worse as he glanced up at the others all sitting around him and staring right at it.

“No one say a word,” he said.

“Is— he okay?” Darrow blurted instantly, now that the silence was broken.

“I… can feel his heartbeat,” John replied hesitantly. “And he’s—”

Oom moved. Rearranged himself, squirming, tentacles _tickling horribly_ and his tail only making things worse. John squirmed, too, biting his lip and exhaling a sudden, hard breath at the way it felt. And why it felt… _pleasant_ , which he definitely couldn’t ever hope to explain.

“He’s fine,” John wheezed. Then he took another breath and rasped, “He’s breathing.”

“Hhhow… do you know that?” Darrow said.

“It’s a Wrognoth pouch, so…” Walker shrugged, “they carry young in it sometimes. It’s really, _really_ sensitive in there. They can feel breathing, heartbeat, temperature…”

“Wish you’d mentioned that _before_ ,” John said breathlessly.

She blinked at him in perfect innocence. “I had. In the mess hall. Remember?”

In the mess hall when he’d been staring at that girl who always worked on the deep space sensor array.

Sure, he definitely remembered that. Not.

“I really need to start paying attention,” he muttered. But he took another breath and said, “Rivers, help me up.”

“Sir,” Rivers said, a little awkwardly, as he rose to his feet while clasping John’s wrist, helping hoist him into a stand. His insides sloshed again, horribly, and he felt like he’d left Oom down there near the floor for a second before the pleasant weight caught up to him again.

“Alright,” he said, snatching up the SMG that still dangled from his vest and knocked stupidly against his big damn stomach, “we need to get the hell back to the _Odyssey_ and fix this.”

They turned to leave, but John stopped in his tracks and ordered, “And somebody get his suit.”

Rivers immediately turned to collect it. John cocked his head and side-eyed Darrow and Walker, standing there like a pair of dorks staring hard at his stomach in some kind of absolute fascination like they wanted to touch it and scan it and never stop. Scientist vultures.

“I want it fixed _immediately_ ,” John added pointedly.

Darrow came inching over a little closer, holding some kind of scanner. John stopped right in his tracks, so suddenly that Darrow almost tripped over himself trying to get a scan of him.

“Henry,” John said, “keep hovering around me down there like a doctor and I’ll see if _you_ fit in there next.”

That got Darrow to freeze up and stare at him, wide-eyed. “You wouldn’t.”

John held the stare and quirked a brow ever so slightly.

Did he ever mention Darrow was claustrophobic?

Darrow opened and closed his mouth once, slowly stood up straight – or as straight as he usually did – and put the scanner away, not looking at him. “You can be a very scary man, Shephard.”

He flashed a quick little smile. “You don’t have to flatter me.” Then he jabbed up ahead with his chin and said, “Come on.”

**Author's Note:**

> [If you enjoy my writing, be sure to check out more (especially my original works) on my blog!](https://maverick-werewolf.tumblr.com/)


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